Article published in:
Interaction Studies
Vol. 18:1 (2017) ► pp. 26–54

Carrying, caring, and conversing

Constraints on the emergence of cooperation, conformity, and language

| University of Connecticut

Social and ecological research and theory are used to elaborate and enrich two important sets of accounts of language origins. One is the interdependence and shared intentionality hypothesis (e.g., Tomasello, 2014a) of the ways in which humans became cooperative and conforming in ways that other apes did not, eventually leading to language. A second set of accounts addresses the emergence of bipedalism and its connections to language and to many other anatomical, cognitive, and social features that are distinctive in humans. Particular attention is given to the carrying and caretaking of infants. Research and theory challenging common assumptions about the role of conformity in cooperation and conversation are reviewed and integrated into these accounts. Together these varying perspectives point toward a more dialogical, dynamic, and distributed understanding of social interactions and the values that motivate and constrain humans’ social and linguistic skills.

Keywords: bipedalism, caring, carrying, cooperation, conformity, divergence, language evolution, social learning, values
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The evolution of interdependence
  • 3.Walking, carrying, caring, and dialogical arrays
  • 4.Diverging, converging, and the complexity of social learning
  • 5.A dialogical, values-realizing approach to social interaction and language
  • Acknowledgements
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 10 August 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.18.1.02hod
References
Adornetti, I
(2015) Competition and cooperation in language evolution: A comparison between communication of apes and humans. In F. E’Errico, I. Poggi, J. Vinciarelli, & L. Vincze (Eds.), Conflict and multimodal communication: Social research and machine intelligence (pp. 91–101). New York: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Allen, J. M., Worman, C. O., Light, J. E., & Reed, D. L
(2013) Parasitic lice help to fill in the gaps of early hominid history. In J. F. Brinkworth & K. Pechenkina (Eds.), Primates, pathogens and evolution (pp. 161–186). New York: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Amaral, L. Q
(2008) Mechanical analysis of infant carrying in hominoids. Naturwissenschaften, 951, 281–292. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Asch, S. E
(1956) Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70, no. 9 (Whole No. 416). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berger, J., & Heath, C
(2008) Who drives divergence? Identity signaling, outgroup similarity, and the abandonment of cultural tastes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 951, 593–607. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boesch, C
(2005) Joint cooperative hunting among wild chimpanzees in the Taï National Park. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 281, 692–693. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bolhuis, J. J., Tattersall, I., Chomsky, N., & Berwick, R. C
(2014) How could language have evolved? PLOS Biology, 12, 8, e1001934. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boyd, R., Richerson, P. J., & Henrich, J
(2011) The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 1081, 10918–10925.
Bråten, S
(2000) Essays on dialogue in infant and adult. Bergen, Norway: Sigma.Google Scholar
(2004) Hominin infant decentration hypothesis: Mirror neurons system adapted to subserve mother-centered participation. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 271, 508–509. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2007) Participant perception of the speaker by conversation partners and infant learners: On the origins of (m)othercentred participation. Paper presented at the Symposium of the Distributed Language Group, Language dynamics and the phenomenology of individual experience, Grimstad, Norway.
(2009) The intersubjective mirror in infant learning and evolution of speech. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carvalho, S., Biro, D., Cunha, E., Hockings, K., McGrew, W. C., Richmond, B. G., & Matsuzawa, T
(2010) Chimpanzee carrying behaviour and the origins of human bipedality. Current Biology, 22(6), R180–R181. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J
(2004) Social influence: Compliance and conformity. Annual Review of Psychology, 551, 591–621. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cialdini, R., & Trost, M
(1998) Social influence: Social norms, conformity, and compliance. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (Vol. 21, 4th edition) (pp. 151–192). New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Claidière, N., & Whiten, A
(2012) Integrating the study of conformity and culture in human and nonhuman animals. Psychological Bulletin, 1381, 126–145. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corriveau, K. H., Fusaro, M., & Harris, P. L
(2009) Going with the flow: Preschoolers prefer nondissenters as informants. Psychological Science, 201, 372–377. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corriveau, K. H., & Harris, P. L
(2010) Preschoolers (sometimes) defer to the majority in making simple perceptual judgments. Developmental Psychology, 461, 437–445. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corriveau, K. H., Kinzler, K. D., & Harris, P. L
(2013) Accuracy trumps accent in children’s endorsement of object labels. Developmental Psychology, 491, 470–479. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. H
(1996) Using language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cowley, S
(2004) Early hominins, utterance-activity, and niche construction. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 271, 509–510. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crockford, C., Wittig, R. M., Mundry, R., & Zuberbühler, K
(2012) Wild chimpanzees inform ignorant group members of danger. Current Biology, 221, 1–5. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crockford, C., Wittig, R. M., Langergraber, K., Ziegler, T. E., Zuberbühler, K., & Deschner, T
(2013) Urinary oxytocin and social bonding in related and unrelated wild chimpanzees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2801, 20122765. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duguid, S., Wyman, E., Bullinger, A. F., Herfurth-Majstorovic, K., & Tomasello, M
(2014), Coordination strategies of chimpanzees and human children in a Stag Hunt game. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2811, 20141973. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Efferson, C., Lalive, R., Richerson, P. J., McElreath, R., & Lubell, M
(2008) Conformists and mavericks: the empirics of frequency-dependent cultural transmission. Evolution of Human Behavior, 291, 56–64. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Efferson, C., Richerson, P. J., McElreath, R., Lubell, M., Edsten, E., Waring, T. M., Paciotti, B., & Baum, W
(2007) Learning, productivity, and noise: an experimental study of cultural transmission on the Bolivian Altiplano. Evolution and Human Behavior, 281, 11–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enquist, M., Eriksson, K., & Ghirlanda, S
(2007) Critical social learning: A solution to Roger’s paradox of nonadaptive culture. American Anthropologist, 1091, 727–734. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eriksson, K., & Coultas, J. C
(2009) Are people really conformist-biased? An empirical test and a new mathematical model. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 71, 5–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eriksson, K., Enquist, M., & Ghirlanda, S
(2007) Critical points in current theory of conformist social learning. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 51, 67–87. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eriksson, K., & Strimling, P
(2009) Biases for acquiring information individually rather than socially. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 71, 309–329. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Falk, D
(2004) Prelinguistic evolution in early hominins: Whence motherese? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 271, 491–541. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2009) Finding our tongues: Mothers, infants, and the origins of language. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Francis, W. N
(1983) Dialectology. London: Longmans.Google Scholar
Fusaroli, R., Bahrami, B., Olsen, K., Roepstorff, A., Rees, G., Frith, C., & Tylén, K
(2012) Coming to terms: quantifying the benefits of linguistic coordination. Psychological Science, 231 931–939. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haun, D.B. M., Rekers, Y., & Tomasello, M
(2014) Children conform to the behavior of peers; Other great apes stick with what they know. Psychological Science, 251, 2160–2167. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haun, D.B. M., & Tomasello, M
(2011) Conformity to peer pressure in preschool children. Child Development, 821, 1759–1767. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Healey, P.G. T., Purver, M., & Howes, C
(2014) Divergence in dialogue. PLOS One, 9, 6, e98598. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heft, H
(1983) Wayfinding as the perception of information over time. Population & Environment, 61, 133–150. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heyes, C. M
(2011) Automatic imitation. Psychological Bulletin, 1371, 463–483. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hodges, B. H
(2007a) Good prospects: Ecological and social perspectives on conforming, creating, and caring in conversation. Language Sciences, 291, 584–604. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2007b) Values define fields: The intentional dynamics of driving, carrying, leading, negotiating, and conversing. Ecological Psychology, 191, 153–178.Google Scholar
(2009) Ecological pragmatics: Values, dialogical arrays, complexity, and caring. Pragmatics & Cognition, 171, 628–652. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2014) Rethinking conformity and imitation: Divergence, convergence, and social understanding. Frontiers in Psychology: Cognitive Science, 5, 726.Google Scholar
(2017) Conformity and divergence in interactions, groups, and culture. In S. Harkins, K. Williams, & J. Burger (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of social influence (pp. 87–105). New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hodges, B. H., & Baron, R. M
(1992) Values as constraints on affordances: Perceiving and acting properly. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 221, 263–294. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hodges, B. H., & Geyer, A
(2006) A nonconformist account of the Asch experiments: Values, pragmatics, and moral dilemmas. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 101, 2–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hodges, B. H., & Lindhiem, O
(2006) Carrying babies and groceries: The effect of moral and social weight on caring. Ecological Psychology, 181, 93–111. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hodges, B. H., Meagher, B. R., Norton, D. J., McBain, R., & Sroubek, A
(2014) Speaking from ignorance: Not agreeing with others we believe are correct. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1061, 218–234. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hofman, D., Bos, P. A., Schutter, J.L. G., & van Honk, J
(2012) Fairness modulates non-conscious facial mimicry in women. Proceedings of the Royal Society B , 2791, 3535–3539.
Hrdy, S. B
(1999) Mother nature: A history of mothers, infants and natural selection. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
(2009) Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hunt, K. D
(1994) The evolution of human bipedality: Ecology and functional morphology. Journal of Human Evolution, 261, 183–202. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Isbell, L. A., & Young, T. P
(1996) The evolution of bipedalism in hominids and reduced group size in chimpanzees: Alternative responses to decreasing resource availability. Journal of Human Evolution, 301, 289–297. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jetten, J., & Hornsey, M. J
(2014) Deviance and dissent in groups. Annual Review of Psychology, 651, 461–485. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johansson, S., Zlatev, J., & Gardenfors, P
(2006) Why don’t chimps talk and humans sing like canaries? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 291, 287–288. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Karremans, J. C., & Verwijmeren, T
(2008) Mimicking attractive opposite-sex others: The role of romantic relationship status. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 341, 939–950. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Laks, B
(2013) Why is there variation rather than nothing? Language Sciences, 391, 31–53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewis, D
(1969) Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Locke, J. L., & Bogin, B
(2006) Language and life history: A new perspective on the development and evolution of human language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 291, 259–325. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lovejoy, C. O
(1981) The origin of man. Science, 2111, 341–350. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2009) Reexamining human origins in light of Ardipithecus ramidus . Science, 3261, 74e1-74e8. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lovejoy, C. O., Suwa, G., Spurlock, L., Asfaw, B., & White, T. D
(2009) The pelvis and femur of Ardipithecus ramidus: The emergence of upright walking. Science, 3261, 71e1-71e6. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lumsden, J., Miles, L. K., Richardson, M. J., Smith, C. A., & Macrae, C. N
(2012) Who syncs? Social motives and interpersonal coordination. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 481, 746–751. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marsh, K. L., Richardson, M. J., & Schmidt, R. C
(2009) Social connection through joint action and interpersonal coordination. Topics in Cognitive Science, 11, 320–339. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McBride, G
(2014) Storytelling, behavior planning, and language evolution in context. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1131. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McElreath, R., Lubell, M., Richerson, P. J., Waring, T. M., Baum, W., Edsten, E., Efferson, C., & Paciotti, B
(2005) Applying evolutionary models to the laboratory study of social learning. Evolution and Human Behavior, 261, 483–508. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mercier, H., & Sperber, D
(2011) Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 341, 57–111. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mesoudi, A
(2011) An experimental comparison of human social learning strategies: Payoff-biased social learning is adaptive but underused. Evolution and Human Behavior, 321, 334–342. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Millikan, R. G
(2005) Language: A biological model. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mills, G. J
(2014) Dialogue in joint activity: Complementarity, convergence and conventionalization. New Ideas in Psychology, 321, 158–173. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moll, H., & Tomasello, M
(2007) Co-operation and human cognition: The Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 3621, 639–648. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2012) Three-year-olds understand appearance and reality - Just not about the same object at the same time. Developmental Psychology, 481, 1124–1132. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moore, R
(2013) Imitation and conventional communication. Biology & Philosophy, 281, 481–500. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nielsen, M
(2006) Copying actions and copying outcomes: Social learning through the second year. Developmental Psychology, 421, 555–565. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nielsen, M., Mushin, I., Tomaselli, K., & Whiten, A
(2014) Where culture takes hold: “Overimitation” and its flexible deployment in Western, Aboriginal, and Bushmen children. Child Development, 851, 2169–2184.Google Scholar
Nielsen, M., & Tomaselli, K
(2010) Overimitation in Kalahari bushman children and the origins of human cultural cognition. Psychological Science, 211, 729–736. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Niemitz, C
(2010) The evolution of upright posture and gait—a review and a new synthesis. Naturwissenschaften, 971, 241–263. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Over, H., & Carpenter, M
(2012) Putting the social into social learning: Explaining both selectivity and fidelity in children’s copying behavior. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 1261, 182–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pasquini, E. S., Corriveau, K. H., Koenig, M., & Harris, P. L
(2007) Preschoolers monitor the relative accuracy of informants. Developmental Psychology, 431, 1216–1226. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S
(2004) Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 271, 169–190. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pontzer, H., Raichlen, D. A., & Sockol, M. D
(2009) The metabolic cost of walking in humans, chimpanzees, and early hominins. Journal of Human Evolution, 561, 43–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Provine, R. H
(2004) Walkie-talkie evolution: Bipedalism and vocal production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 271, 520–521. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Raubal, M
(2008) Wayfinding: Affordances and agent simulation. Encyclopedia of GIS (pp. 1243–1246). New York: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reddy, V
(2008) How infants know minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Redhead, G., & Dunbar, R.I. M
(2013) The functions of language: An experimental study. Evolutionary Psychology, 111, 845–854. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reed, E. S
(1996) Encountering the world: Toward an ecological psychology. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rekers, Y., Haun, D.B. M., & Tomasello, M
(2011) Children, but not chimpanzees, prefer to collaborate. Current Biology, 211, 1756–1758. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R
(2005) Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Riley, M. A., & Turvey, M. T
(2002) Variability and determinism in motor behavior. Journal of Motor Behavior, 341, 99–125. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roche, J. M., Dale, R., & Caucci, G. M
(2012) Double up on double meanings: Pragmatic alignment. Language and Cognitive Processes, 271, 1–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rost, G. C., & McMurray, B
(2010) Finding the signal by adding noise: The role of noncontrastive phonetic variability in early world learning. Infancy, 151, 608–635. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schel, A. M., Townsend, S. W., Machanda, Z., Zuberbühler, K., & Slocombe, K. E
(2013) Chimpanzee alarm call production meets key criteria for intentionality. PLOS One, 81, e76674. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shockley, K., Santana, M. V., & Fowler, C. A
(2003) Mutual interpersonal postural constraints are involved in cooperative conversation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 291, 326–332. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sockol, M. D., Raichlen, D. A., & Pontzer, H
(2007) Chimpanzee locomotor energetics and the origin of human bipedalism. PNAS, 1041, 12265–12269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sterelny, K
(2003) Thought in a hostile world. Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Strigul, N
(2009) Can imitation explain dialect origins? Ecological Modeling, 2201, 2624–2639. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Suddendorf, T
(2013) The gap: The science of what separates us from other animals. New York: Basic Books. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sutou, S
(2012) Hairless mutation: A driving force of humanization from a human-ape common ancestor by enforcing upright walking while holding a baby with both hands. Genes to Cells, 171, 264–272. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tilsen, S
(2015) Structured nonstationarity in articulatory timing. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M
(1999) The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
(2008) Origins of human communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2009) Why we cooperate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2014a) A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2014b) The ultra-social animal. European Journal of Social Psychology, 441, 187–194. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M., & Haberl, K
(2003) Understanding attention: 12- and 18-month olds know what is new for other persons. Developmental Psychology, 391, 906–912. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M., Melis, A. P., Tennie, C., Wyman, E., & Herrmann, E
(2012) Two key steps in the evolution of human cooperation: The interdependence hypothesis. Current Anthropology, 531, 673–692. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M., & Vaish, A
(2013) Origins of human cooperation and morality. Annual Review of Psychology, 641, 231–255. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Waters, D. P
(2012) From extended phenotype to extended affordance: Distributed language at the intersection of Gibson and Dawkins. Language Sciences, 341, 507–512. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watson, J., Payne, R., Chamberlain, A., Jones, R. K., & Sellers, W. I
(2008) The energetic costs of load-carrying and the evolution of bipedalism. Journal of Human Evolution, 541, 675–683. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2009) The kinematics of load carrying in humans and great apes: Implications for the evolution of human bipedalism. Folia Primatology, 801, 309–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Whalen, D
(2014) Deliberate variability in speech for flexibly engaging other speakers. Poster at conference, Finding Common Ground: Social, Ecological, and Cognitive Perspectives on Language Use , University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT. DOI logo
Whiten, A., McGuigan, N., Marshall-Pescini, S., & Hopper, L. M
(2009) Emulation, imitation, over-imitation and the scope of culture for child and chimpanzee. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 3641, 2417–2428. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wittig, R. M., Crockford, C., Deschner, T., Langergraber, K., Ziegler, T. E., & Zuberbühler, K
(2014) Food sharing is linked to urinary oxytocin levels and bonding in related and unrelated wild chimpanzees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2811, 20133096. DOI logoGoogle Scholar

Full-text

Carrying, caring, and conversing
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Hodges, Bert H
2022. Values define agency: Ecological and enactive perspectives reconsidered. Adaptive Behavior ► pp. 105971232210768 ff. Crossref logo
Hodges, Bert H. & Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi
2022. Ecological Values Theory: Beyond Conformity, Goal-Seeking, and Rule-Following in Action and Interaction. Review of General Psychology 26:1 ► pp. 86 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 january 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.